April Media Madness: From fake news to the heart of darkness

WASHINGTON, April 24, 2017 – For our latest edition of online news and blogger highlights, we highlight a grab bag of amusing, outrageous and even thoughtful stories, most highlighting, as always, the illogical, elitist swamp created over decades by progressive scum-meisters across America and across the globe.

Let’s begin our festivities with a recent White House photo that scandalized pretty much anyone who voted last November for the Smartest Woman in the Whole Wide World.

From the Twitterverse:

The notorious TrumpPalinNugentKidRock White House photo, with lame comment appended:

Comment: This moment was extracted from a new Netflix series by the increasingly questionable “Bill Nye the Science Guy” which is apparently aimed at families. What in Hades is this country coming to? A modest proposal: Any dudes willing to come up with a Singing Penis video? This might prove to be a viable Deplorable weapon of mass destruction, causing gender feminists worldwide to succumb to a powerful collective stroke. Maybe we could start out modestly by wearing penis hats and see what happens next.

ANOTHER GREAT MOMENT IN AIRLINE SERVICE: FLIGHT DECK FIGHTS. Ed Morrissey on yesterday’s incident on an American Airlines flight from SFO to DFW: “Finally, perhaps it’s time for the major airlines to consider what their industry is doing to both its customers and its employees. Their commercials depict flying as a serene, relaxing jaunt, but that’s increasingly a bitterly comedic satire on the actual experience. Commercial air travel has become more and more uncomfortable and tense. Both passengers and crews feel increasing pressure from packed flights with smaller spaces, and the security measures from TSA only exacerbate the poisonous environment. Passengers and employees are beginning to snap, and the ubiquitous nature of smartphones guarantees that every incident will go viral — because their customers don’t like them. They just have very little choice in airlines. Until the industry rethinks its direction, this will be the new normal, and executives will get a lot of practice at apologizing and minimizing.”

Comment: Cattle in cattle cars and sardines packed into sardine cans have more room to move than steerage class airline customers. This tight-packing strategy by airlines is creating conditions that can eventually cause even the most mild-mannered passenger to suddenly go batshit-crazy under the right circumstances.

Keeping things serious for just another brief moment, here’s a story published in early April by The American Thinker that offers another interesting thread on the Living Dead Movement otherwise known via the oxymoron “progressivism.”

Postmodernism is leftism

Professor Stephen Hicks’s central thesis on postmodernist intellectuals is that they recognised that socialism was dead or dying (in the late 1960s,1970s, and 1980s) and thus decided to do something about it. What did they do? They developed their own distinctive “sceptical” (yet still left-wing!) philosophies. In 1974, for example, Herbert Marcuse was asked whether he thought the New Left was dead. Hicks quotes Marcuse as replying: “’I don’t think it’s dead, and it will resurrect in the universities.’”

He was dead right about that!

Comment: Postmodernism a Very Big Deal in the humanities a lifetime ago when I was working on my doctorate in English and American Lit. Its position of honor was even then being usurped by the even greater lunacies of deconstructionism and, ultimately, the endless stream of impossible-to-parse “theories” that have rendered the study of Western Lit “inoperative” as Ron Zeigler might have said. It’s a sad, ruinous state of affairs.

Back to the fun, via the New York Times and the fast-declining Washington Post, once my hometown newspaper but now one of the biggest jokes on the East Coast:

The New York Times’ executive editor Dean Baquet joked about The Washington Post’s new slogan Sunday, according to Advertising Age.

“I love our competition with the Washington Post. I think it’s great. But I think their slogan — Marty Baron please forgive me for saying this — sounds like the next Batman movie,” he said at the South by Southwest conference.

The slogan appears on the paper’s website, the front page of the print edition, and on other platforms.

Comment: For decades now, Washington, D.C. has been oozing back into the primeval swamp from whence, big with promise, America’s capital city once arose. The unintentional hilarity caused by the WaPo’s daily mass embrace of fake news may eventually rival The Onion when it comes to ribald humor. Lazy, utterly biased Post scribes take left-wingnut nonsense to its inevitable, unsourced, un-fact-checked demise.

This story jogged an old high school memory… a number of class sections in my all-guys Jesuit HS put together monthly news rags devoted to scurrilous stuff. For our section rag, we adopted the old Scripps-Howard lighthouse logo, but bestowed upon it a different, somewhat less lofty slogan: “Give the people light… And they will be blinded.” Somehow that works with this story, though we thought it was a funny joke at the time.

Let’s close today’s fun and games with a slightly long-of-tooth video that’s likely to remain relevant for some time…

Comment: All animals are equal, but some are way more equal than others. If anyone pulled this on any Snowflake anywhere, he or she would end up with a life sentence. Cosmic question: Where were this obnoxious, self-righteous young woman’s parental units when she was growing up?

See you again soon with more real-life nonsense that even a first-rate novelist couldn’t make up.

Biographical Note: Dateline Award-winning music and theater critic for The Connection Newspapers and the Reston-Fairfax Times, Terry was the music critic for the Washington Times print edition (1994-2010) and online Communities (2010-2014). Since 2014, he has been the Business and Entertainment Editor for Communities Digital News (CDN).
A former stockbroker and a writer and editor with many interests, he served as editor under contract from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and continues to write on science and business topics. He is a graduate of Georgetown University (BA, MA) and the University of South Carolina where he was awarded a Ph.D. in English and American Literature and co-founded one of the earliest Writing Labs in the country. Twitter: @terryp17